Modernism Versus Postmodernism

When the topic of "postmodernism" is discussed in "deconstructivist" circles, it is obligatory—a sign of good manners, so to speak—to begin with a negative reference to Habermas, with a kind of distancing from him. In complying with this custom, we would like to add a new twist: to propose that Habermas is himself postmodernist, although in a peculiar way, without knowing it. To sustain this thesis, we will question the very way Habermas constructs the opposition between modernism (defined by its claim to a universality of reason, its refusal of the authority of tradition, its acceptance of rational argument as the only way to defend conviction, its ideal of a communal life guided by mutual understanding and recognition and by the absence of constraint) and postmodernism (defined as the "deconstruction" of this claim to universality, from Nietzsche to "poststructuralism''; the endeavor to prove that this claim to universality is necessarily, constitutively "false," that it masks a particular network of power relations; that universal reason is as such, in its very form, "repressive" and "totalitarian"; that its truth claim is nothing but an effect of a series of rhetorical figures. This opposition is simply false: for what Habermas describes as "postmodernism" is the immanent obverse of the modernist project itself; what he describes as the tension between modernism and postmodernism is the immanent tension that has defined modernism from its very beginning.

Was not the aestheticist, antiuniversalist ethics of the individual's shaping his life as a work of art always part of the modernist project? Is the genealogic unmasking of universal categories and values, the calling into question of the universality of reason not a modernist procedure par excellence? Is not the very essence of theoretical modernism, the revelation of the "effective contents" behind the "false consciousness" (of ideology, of morality, of the ego), exemplified by the great triad of Marx-Nietzsche-Freud? Is not the ironic, self-destructive gesture by means of which reason recognizes in itself the force of repression and domination against which it fights—the gesture at work from Nietzsche to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment—is not this gesture the supreme act of modernism? As soon as fissures appear in the unquestionable authority of tradition, the tension between universal reason and the particular contents escaping its grasp is inevitable and irreducible.

The line of demarcation between modernism and postmodernism must, then, lie elsewhere. Ironically, it is Habermas himself who, on account of certain crucial features of his theory, belongs to postmodernism: the break between the first and the second generation of the Frankfurt school, that is, between Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse on the one side and Habermas on the other, corresponds precisely to the break between modernism and postmodernism. In Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, in their unmasking of the repressive potential of "instrumental reason," aiming at a radical revolution in the historical totality of the contemporary world and at the utopian abolition of the difference between "alienated" life spheres, between art and "reality," the modernist project reaches its zenith of self-critical fulfillment. Habermas is, on the other hand, postmodern precisely because he recognizes a positive condition of freedom and emancipation in what appeared to modernism as the very form of alienation: the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, the functional division of different social domains, etc. This renunciation of the modernist utopia, this acceptance of the fact that freedom is possible only on the basis of a certain fundamental "alienation,'' attests to the fact that we are in a postmodernist universe.

This confusion concerning the break between modernism and postmodernism comes to a critical point in Habermas's diagnosis of poststructuralist deconstructionism as the dominant form of contemporary philosophical postmodernism. The use of the prefix "post-" in both cases should not lead us astray (especially if we take into account the crucial but usually overlooked fact that the very term "poststructuralism," although designating a strain of French theory, is an Anglo-Saxon and German invention. The term refers to the way the Anglo-Saxon world perceived and located the
theories of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc.—in France itself, nobody uses the term "poststructuralism"). Deconstructionism is a modernist procedure par excellence; it presents perhaps the most radical version of the logic of "unmasking" whereby the very unity of the experience of meaning is conceived as the effect of signifying mechanisms, an effect that can take place only insofar as it ignores the textual movement that produced it. It is only with Lacan that the "postmodernist" break occurs, insofar as he thematizes a certain real, traumatic kernel whose status remains deeply ambiguous: the real resists symbolization, but it is at the same time its own retroactive product. In this sense we could even say that deconstructionists are basically still "structuralists" and that the only "poststructuralist" is Lacan, who affirms enjoyment as "the real Thing," the central impossibility around which every signifying network is structured.

From : Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. (page : 86-87)

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